passed away after a long
illness in the town of Fagnano Olona near
Milan, on August 20, 2014. He is survived
by Niki, his devoted wife of 20 years.
Dario was born in Milan on January
20, 1953. Although he experienced
severe emotional deprivation from the
time he was very young – his mother
never accepted him as her child and his
father died when Dario was only eight
years old – Dario eventually managed to
overcome these challenges. His ability to
do so stemmed from the life-altering
event that occurred when he was 20 years
old, for it was then that he met the
Dharma through his holy gurus: Lama
Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
Starting in the early 1970s, Dario
spent many years at the newly established

January - March 2015 Mandala 51

Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa in Pomaia.
He would often say that those years at
the Istituto – immersed in the Dharma
and surrounded by the lamas, his friends
and the beauties of Tuscany – were the
best years of his life. Dario was a skillful
translator from English to Italian, and in
this capacity he often helped out at
Centro Lama Tzong Khapa in Treviso,
near Venice, translating for such highly-
accomplished lamas as Serkong Tsenshab
Rinpoche and Geshe Jampa Lodro,
among others.
He also translated for a Tibetan doctor
in Milan, and that is where he met his fu-
ture wife, Niki. As Niki herself has written
recently, “In 1994, I was very sick and
Western medicine wasn’t proving effective
for me, so I decided to see if the Tibetan
doctor then staying in Milan could be of
help. Dario was translating for the doctor
and that was when I met him for the first
time. So in one day I received a cure for
my illness, met the Dharma, and found
my true love. That was in January and by
April we were together.”
Dario and Niki were to remain a
devoted couple for 20 years and during
that time worked on many projects
together. They built from scratch a
Dharma jewelry company that became
very successful, with some of their
creations appearing in many fashion
magazines, including Vogue. And in 1998,
when they learned that the Chinese
government had given permission for the
Gangchen Monastery in the Sakya district
of Tibet to be rebuilt, they immediately
arranged to sell their house in Tuscany to
raise money for this project. On January
20 of the following year, on Dario’s 46th
birthday, they went to Tibet to begin the
reconstruction of this monastery.
In 2013 the couple returned to Italy
after spending a year and a half in
Colombia. On December 11 of that year
he vomited a lot of blood and the

doctors discovered he had contracted the
“silent” disease, hepatitis C, which had
led to cirrhosis of the liver and then
cancer. The doctors said there was
nothing they could do for him, so Dario
decided to try Tibetan medicine, which
is often very effective in dealing with
liver disease. At the very least there was
the hope that this treatment might give
Dario the time to accept his sickness and
his death and transform them into the
spiritual path. In a letter written June 11,
2014, Dario told a friend, “When I
understood that the doctors were
thinking I was a goner, I had quite a
shock! Immediately meditation on death
became quite real. It was quite good,
because I had the time and leisure to
make peace with my karma.”
Towards the end of his life, Dario’s
body came to resemble that of a preta: he
was nearly as emaciated as a skeleton, but
his abdomen became enormously swollen.
Despite the great pain he was in, he would
often remark that what he was going
through was purification. “Look at my
body,” he told Niki. “This is preta karma,
and I am offering it. I suffer, but I am able
to keep my mind far from the pain.”
In his last months Dario also
expressed great concern for his Dharma
brothers and sisters. He felt that many of
them, while still being Buddhist in
name, no longer had faith that the
Dharma could really bring about a
fundamental and lasting change in their
lives. But he knew from the experience
he was having how effective sincere
Dharma practice could be. Although he
was suffering a lot and it was not easy to
overcome such pain, he was successful in
taming his mind. In this way he was able
to defeat death, to make it part of the
path. And so when he thought of those
friends who seemed to have lost faith in
the Dharma’s effectiveness, he became
filled with the intense desire to help

them see how precious and powerful
Dharma practice could actually be.
Towards the end, although he was in
terrible pain, he found the strength to
thank all the people who were taking care
of him. As Niki wrote a few days after his
passing, “Dario was using his last months
as a deep Dharma practice. He was already
a wonderful man, but at the end his mind
was so light, kind, clear and compassionate
that he was inspiring love in whoever met
him, even in people who only spent a little
time with him. And when he finally passed
away, all the doctors and nurses of the
hospital emergency unit gathered around
him, crying. He had touched them so
deeply that they repeatedly told me,
‘Thank you, to both of you.’”
The Dharma community on which
Dario had relied throughout his adult
life was there for him, at his passing.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche had written a
special mantra for him, and this was
placed on his head and kept in front of
his eyes. And during his last hours Niki
recited his favorite prayer, the “Praise to
the Twenty-one Taras.” Then, within 15
minutes of his passing, she was able to
call a friend in India whose uncle was a
respected lama from Lahaul. This great
Vajrayogini practitioner immediately
performed powa (transference of
consciousness) for him.

Niki wrote the following about
Dario, “He was not an easy person in the
beginning, but he was charming, intelli-
gent and good, and a Dharma guy. But
in the last year he had become something
different, something really special. He
showed me how you can transform life
and sickness and death into the path. He
did not just tell me this; he showed it to
me, and I could see the results with my
own eyes.”